Blood Tribute (The Lucas Gedge Thrillers Book 1) Read Free Page A

importing goods from all corners of the globe, and funnelling profits to the wealthy elite, just a few miles away in the City of London.
    But he’d also heard that there were two Londons. In the west was the city of royalty; of the nobility, the rich industrialists and their many hangers-on. And then there was that other breed of Londoner, mostly occupying the eastern boroughs; a seething mass of humanity that felt no benefit from the imperial hinterland and whose sole concern was how to get through another day alive. The city of the poor: his current destination.

    T he faint sound of wing-beats in the air made Gedge look up, as the reptilian and forbidding form of an otherwise-silent cormorant passed only ten feet above his head. The day had lightened enough to reveal a flat grey, featureless sky. The rust-coloured sails of the barge flapped gently above, as Loic made his way aft to help his brother Mathieu with preparations for docking. The boat’s gear was simple to operate, so a crew of two was sufficient. The sailing barge was a common and versatile vessel of the inshore British waters, but this vessel’s home port was Caen in France.
    As they neared the wharves, Gedge could hear shouts from ashore, and he discerned activity all along the riverbank, as men set to work loading, unloading and moving goods within and around the vast warehouses that lined the bank. Cranes were positioned at regular intervals, and several were in action, lifting loads from the decks of moored ships and into the warehouses. Gedge wondered how many hundreds or thousands of men were involved in these activities all along the Thames.
    The barge edged closer to the wharf, and as the gap reduced to a couple of feet, Mathieu leapt across it and started to secure lines to bollards on the quay. After a few more minutes the boat was brought to a gentle stop and a gangplank lowered to the cobbles of the wharf.
    After saying his goodbyes to Loic and Mathieu, Gedge crossed to dry land and dumped his canvas travelling bag on the ground. From an inside pocket of his coat he brought out a piece of paper bearing three important addresses. They were all in Spitalfields, a borough only a mile or so north of where he stood. The most important was that of his wife and daughter. The second was for The Admiral Jervis, the nearest inn to their home, where he hoped to rent a room for however long it took him to get his bearings in London.
    The last address was that of an elderly gentleman by the name of Claude Rondeau, a former colleague of Colonel Felix Bellhouse, his old commanding officer. Rondeau had arranged for Gedge’s passage on the Saint Claire. Bellhouse had described him as an autodidact with an incredible mind that absorbed huge quantities of information, and who was able to retain the details of a vast network of contacts, stretching beyond Britain and its empire. It was this network that allowed Rondeau to get a message to Gedge while he was travelling north through central France, much to the latter’s amazement.
    It had been a year since Gedge had been forced out of both the army and the Intelligence Department to which he had been attached. Somehow Rondeau had been able to have a man contact him in a café in a country town one evening. One moment he was chatting amiably to a local newspaperman over a glass of red wine; the next, the man was telling him that a boat would take him from Caen, across the channel and up the Thames to Wapping, in a week’s time. After that, Rondeau would like to see him and hoped to interest him in an offer of work, if that was agreeable to Gedge. All very strange and intriguing. But if it helped Gedge find his feet in the city, he was all for meeting the man.
    He took one last look around him. Over the city, smoke was starting to rise from thousands of chimneys. On the river, vessels of all sizes and descriptions—from large freighters down to wherries and dinghies—were beginning to ply their trade. Along the